Still and sparkling

Obviously I’m gonna post about the Women’s March

I attended the Women’s March in Chicago on Saturday and it was one of the most empowering, invigorating, and hopeful experiences of my life. You already know all about it so I’m not going to rehash something that’s dominating the internet right now. Here are, simply, some thoughts that have been running through my head since yesterday:

A big, grateful shout-out to Black women, who have been at the forefront of activism and protests for so long, and rarely (if ever) get the credit they deserve. It’s worth remembering that 53% of white women voted for our current President, that the Women’s March was overwhelmingly a white event, and that many of us turned out to march because we had been SHOCKED by the election results, and we wouldn’t have been so shocked if we’d been listening properly.

The march made me feel better than I’ve felt since approximately 8:00pm Central time on November 8, 2016. So much energy and determination and good spirits. Laughing, chanting, cheering. I hope we can harness that and keep it going, use it for good works.

At the end of the day, protesting is easy. It’s easy when the target of the protest is reprehensible in just about every way; it’s easy when the protest is widespread and popular enough to be a fun social event; it’s easy when it’s a mostly white event where the police don’t have any real intention of making arrests because of racism. The real work is harder, but ultimately it matters more.

I am so deeply happy about the turnout to the marches, worldwide, compared to the piss-poor inauguration turnout. LOL 4EVER.

Anti-choice feminists are not feminists. They are mutually exclusive. I don’t care if you personally don’t like abortion–that’s fine, you do you–but if you try to impose that belief on other women’s bodies, you’re by definition not a feminist.

I do love seeing [white, cis, often straight] dudes shouting about equality and reproductive health and gay rights and immigration. My dudes, it would be so easy for you to be apathetic or actively hostile toward issues that don’t affect you, but you come out and support marginalized folks and I wanna say…thanks for giving a fuck. Yes, I hate that the basic message here is “thank you for acknowledging my humanity and caring about it,” I KNOW I SHOULDN’T HAVE TO SAY THAT, but I want to say it anyway. Men who show up for women warm my heart.

I hope Hillary got some joy at seeing pictures from the march. I hope she remembers it when she’s feeling down.